Five iPhone apps to make your photos stand out

By Elena Santos

Nov 22, 2010

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I’ve used the camera on my iPhone a lot ever since I bought it. I love taking pictures of any random stuff I come across: water drops on the window, tree leaves on the pavement, kids playing in the park, car lights lining up under a traffic light. The built-in camera in the iPhone is perfect for those casual shots, but if you download the right photo apps you can turn ordinary images into small works of art. Here are some of my favorite:

Polarize – This is probably one of the simplest apps you can use to add effects to your photos. As you can tell by the name, Polarize gives your photo a “Polaroid” effect by framing it with the characteristic white border. You can use photos from the iPhone’s camera roll or take one on the spot, and also add a title to it in a handwriting font.

TiltShiftGenerator -Like Polarize, this app focuses on just one effect but it does quite a nice job. You can use it to create an attractive “tilt-shift” effect with any photo you take at the moment, or the ones stored in the iPhone’s camera roll. The effect is totally customizable, meaning you can tweak settings such as blur, saturation, brightness, contrast and vignette.

CameraBag – This app differs from the two previous ones, in the sense that it doesn’t offer just one effect. In the case of CameraBar, you get eleven different effects to choose from, like Colorcross, Instant, Cinema, Helga, Plastic or Magazine. Again, the effects can be applied to photos you just took or you have in the camera roll, and can also be shared by email.

Hipstamatic – This is one of the most popular photo apps in the App Store. Not only does it let you apply a whole lot of effects to your photos by swapping lenses, film and flash settings, but you can also tweak settings like blur, vignette and saturation to obtain unique images. Hipstamatic is easily extended with packs of extra lenses and filters.

Instagram– Like the previous app, Instagram is also quite popular – and a bit different from what we’ve seen so far in this list. Besides letting you take photos and add effects to them, the main aim behind this app is sharing those photos online in the Instagram community. You can also rate and comment photos shared by your friends.

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